Let me first open with this: While I have no prior education on The Jesus Seminar, the works of Mack or Crossan, I enjoy reading Wright's critique. My aim, as is yours, is not to digest everything in Wright's bibliography, rather to get a running dialogue going so that, upon the conference, we can keep up! I trust this blog will help us do that.
That said, I feel like I can't write a whole lot yet about his textual criticisms of other books. Can I just briefly note some items that struck me in Jesus Then & Now:
1) The first thing I underlined in pg 5 is at the bottom: "...it has been realized that Jesus must be understood in his Jewish context." We would certainly agree...but then to read about the Seminar, and even a few hundred years ago with the movements of the Reformers, it's been made apparent that many people have failed to do this. After reading NTPG, I can't read the Synoptic Gospels the same anymore. I don't understand it all (!), but I understand the impetus to read him in contect.
2) Wright's brief description of the Reformers movement reminded me that I have many reasons to thank them...and to be critical as well. Pg 14: "The reformers had very thorough answers to the question 'why did Jesus die?'; they did not have nearly such good answers to the question 'why did Jesus live?' I must agree. Some of the key doctrines that we believe today concerning the Atonement, Salvation, Sanctification, & such were formulated & articulated during the Reformation. When I think back to the beginning of my faith journey, I feel like I have them to thank.
As I get older, however, I find that my sanctification--my answer to the question 'how now shall I live?'--is based on Jesus life and ministry. And that is further enriched when I read Jesus in his appropriate Jewish context.
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Michael,
ReplyDeleteIn regards to format, I'd say we can sort of take this however we want. Because you have started the ball rolling, I think I will do some posting as well. For myself, I think I'll be isolating certain comments, opinions, topics, etc. to each individual post so that they can be responded to and thought of separately. I believe what you did still lends itself to further discussion, too, so I'd say that whatever works would be good. Additionally, while we are definitely preparing for the conference in April, I think that by simply consuming the text for the purpose of comprehension later on, we may miss part of what the purpose is in our study together. Also, because so much of this becomes more intertwined as we study, we'll probably find that we travel between critical study and devotional because of the subject matter.
I definitely believe that certainly we have much to be thankful about the reason that Jesus died(although that is still extremely confusing) and the ramifications for us now because of it. Many of the foundations of our faith, as you said, are based on these core principles that seem to be the makeup up many people's faiths(especially in the western church). While that may be substantial enough for some, for other's such as ourselves, we find that this is not very comprehensive and seems to miss out on the whole picture. I will elaborate some more of these thoughts in an actual post, though, because it has largely been on my mind lately.
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